The Politics of Domestic and International Accountability Options in Sri Lanka

Alan Keenan  |  24 Mar 2011

Alan Keenan is Senior Analyst and Sri Lanka Project Director with the International Crisis Group. This text is a revised version of a presentation made as part of a live web seminar on "Accountability for Violations of IHL in Counterinsurgency: The Case of Sri Lanka", organised by the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research, on 24 February 2011.

 

1. The need for an international investigation

The International Crisis Group, like others concerned with a sustainable and just peace in Sri Lanka, has been calling for the establishment of an independent and international commission to look into the many credible and well-documented allegations of war crimes in the final months of Sri Lanka’s long civil war. A serious and independent accountability mechanism is needed, first of all, as a matter of principle. The violations of international humanitarian law that we have evidence of and wrote about in our May 2010 report on War Crimes in Sri Lanka, point to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in the final four months of fighting and an assault on the fundamental principles of the laws of war. These are simply too serious to be left without investigation or acknowledgment. Accountability is also important for achieving a set of broader conflict resolution goals: to open up greater political space in Sri Lanka’s shrinking democracy, to lay the groundwork for political reconciliation between the island’s different ethnic communities, to ensure that Sri Lankan Tamils have a clear account of atrocities by the LTTE that can’t be dismissed as pro-government propaganda, and, crucially, to discourage other governments from using indiscriminate and disproportionate force in their own particular “wars on terrorism”                                            .Full Story>>>